As I mentioned last time, this whole retirement thing has turned out to be a bunch busier than I would have guessed. Or have planned for. Like a kid dishing out his own ice cream, I’ve heaped far too much stuff into my bowl. At least for the first part of the year. Net result? My planned post for today on Social Security is still under construction.

I am please to report I have passed the various exams and am now fully VITA certified by the IRS in Basic, Intermediate and Advanced Tax Preparation, along with Ethics. Hmmm. Seems I can’t have client refunds directed into my personal account after all. I can’t even put out a tip jar!

This past Tuesday I attended the second of our French classes. I am reminded as to why I struggled so with it in college. What makes it challenging for me is looking at how the words are spelled and then hearing how they are pronounced. Big difference. Hopefully, with time, it will become more obvious. With Spanish, I can look at a word and be pretty close at guessing the pronunciation. With French, I’ve a lot to learn!

Ordinarily, I save these collections of cool stuff for you for when I slip away for a few weeks or months. But, why wait?

Glenn writes a blog called To Simplify about living and traveling in his van. Recently he decided to downsize even further. He picked up an old Vanagon, gutted it and has begun rebuilding it. His posts on the project have fascinated me. Maybe you, too:

22 Comments

Jim, interesting that we gravitate to the same blogs. Lacking Ambition, MMM, To Simplify, yours and ERE are my favorite blogs. Though ERE is pretty much on hold, I still enjoy reading his old stuff, just lots of wisdom as far as I’m concerned.

This Lacking Ambition fellow is a very interesting character to me and inspiring. He is so young and has personal finance figured out so early in life.

That’s pretty cool. I stumbled across his blog many moons ago and was struck by his simple statement that he just doesn’t want to work. That was an honest proclamation that is 10% me. People look shocked when I say I don’t. The thing is after retirement I am sure there will be plenty of things to fill my time (with joy) but it won’t be actual work-for-money.

I have to make a (motorcycle?) trip up to the Norfeast (pronounciation joke) and visit you, . (lackingambition) and Bart Centre (the guy behind eternal-earthbound-pets.com).
I’m not sure what it is with the Northeast, but it does collect some interesting characters.

BTW, I never found English all that hard to learn. I did start learning it in 3rd grade, but when I moved here as not-quite-a-legal-adult, I realized school learning wasn’t even half the battle. Yet, six months of total immersion and I started dreaming and thinking in English and then it was all just working on my pronunciation. French and German were never my strong points. I am proud to say I could probably get to where I need to go if you dropped me off in the middle of each country, but I’d have to speak Italian (wave my hands a lot) to augment my butchering of their languages.

Thank you, and English will be your reward for treating me to a coffee. I’m currently residing in Texas, but can’t wait to trade that in to return to the West Coast.

Bart is a hoot (thanks for sorting the link) and was gracious enough to autograph his two books for my girlfriend. His site was actually “for real” for about two years if I remember right, and he did interviews and news coverage about it. Hilarity ensued. He came out later and admitted it was a gag, which was very clever and lead to even more laughs.

The world ending was interesting – not only did it spawn religions (7th Day Adventists/Millerites were waiting for the 2nd coming of Christ, he didn’t show, Miller misread, they waited again, Christ didn’t show, etc but they still exist) and interesting behavior in people, but the later ones don’t get publicly shamed forever and ever (he nutters about May 21st, then oh, June, no wait.. Mayans about December 21st) as they should.

I was curious, of course, so I watched the markets and didn’t see a single blip indicating that people feared the end. Of civilization, that is. The fiscal cliff was feared, mostly because it was real.

My money didn’t do anything different. The stocks increased, my 401(k) from the old job rolled into VTSAX, most everything is on autopilot that way. Netflix has been a boon to my portfolio as one of my earliest “smart” investments, Sirius Radio and 3D Printing as well.

French sounds difficult! One thing I can say about Japanese is that there is no trick to learn about pronunciation. Now if there just weren’t so many kanji!

Your link to Glenn’s blog about the Vanagon found me reading nearly all of his posts from the last four months. What a great project! I can’t wait to see how it turns out. His music isn’t half bad either!

A number of years training in Shotokan taught me, if nothing else, to count to ten in Japanese. Usually while in pain. Other than a few commands I don’t remember but would likely respond to, that’s it.

In the defense of French: you English also have a really weird way of writing down your words. Only we Dutch know how to pronounce words in the right way. Everybody else is just ignoring some letters here, adding some unnecessary sounds there and abusing the beautiful ou, au and ui combinations…

no need to defend French, the shortcomings in the learning process are entirely mine. As for English, I’m eternally grateful it is my native language. From what I hear, I wouldn’t want to have to learn it as an adult.

English and Dutch share some things, like paying little attention as to whether a word is male or female, the way we make verbs past or future tense, and how we don’t change a word depending on its role in a sentence (genetiv and dativ in German, things like “the postman did something, the postman’s dog, talk to the postman, hit the postman”, where in German this would ask for different endings of “the” and of “postman”).
We also share words, especially a lot of words about the sea, like sea/zee, boat/boot, fish/vis, keel/kiel and scurbuk/scheurbuik . You can sit on a stool and we will sit on a stoel, but our stoel is actually your chair and your stool is a krukje here.

But I find the “th”-sound impossible to pronounce, at least I understand the real “th”-sound should be with a special movement of your tongue, mine comes out as “d”. And you would find our “ui” sound difficult. And yes, that is one sound, not a sequence of two sounds like ui as in intuitive.

So yes, some similarities (=overeenkomsten) but also some differences (=verschillen).

I was so shocked when I originally learned about giraffe fights! I guess those necks were designed for more than just spotting predators and eating off trees! These are some really cool articles/pics. I’m honored to be among them…thanks so much!

I actually really liked French because there were a lot of words that looked like English ones. The rules on which letters get pronounced are pretty fixed so once you get the hang of it, you should be fine.

Thanks for posting all those neat articles. A few of those are blogs I have not seen before.

Not to get depressing or anything, but many men of our generation grew up without fathers. I’m glad there’s someone out there at least trying to teach the sorts of things you were supposed to learn from dad.